A Conversation With Linus Torvalds, Who Built The World's Most Robust Operating System And Gave It Away For Free

"Lean," perhaps, in the Unix tradition of "do just enough and stay out of the way of the real work." But I'd hesitate to call Linux "robust." That implies Apollo 11-level rigorous proof of correctness, which has never been done on the Linux kernel.

Or, if we're talking about functional robustness, VMS was far more so. Of course, the supported hardware was a lot more narrow, and mis-managing the cash cow didn't help matters.

EDIT: The title was supposed to be poor definition of "robust".

My desktop has Apollo-13-level rigorous proof of correctness.

:o)

> Or, if we're talking about functional robustness, VMS was far more so. ... mis-managing the cash cow didn't help matters.

Yeah, I understand its successor, WNT, was bit more profitable. Robust in the security sense, though... not so much (7min to pwn?).

I suspect that "flexible" is a closer match to the word the author was really looking for, though perhaps still not an exact match for what he was trying to convey.

"versatile"?

But still not "robust," I assert.